CLS working paper 2015/8 The detrimental consequences for victims of bullying are well established. Despite this there remains little empirical evidence about the relationship between sexual minority status including Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual (LGB) and bullying among young people in England. The aim of this paper is to identify whether LGB youth are more at risk of bullying using Next Steps, a nationally representative longitudinal dataset. The findings suggest that young people who are heterosexual have a lower probability of experiencing frequent forms of bullying both during compulsory schooling and at age 19/20 compared to LGB young people. Furthermore, young people who identify as LGB have a higher probability of experiencing frequent physical, verbal, and relational forms of bullying during compulsory schooling compared with heterosexual young people. Being bullied during schooling and at age 19/20 is negatively associated with life satisfaction. Implications of these findings are discussed.

CLS working paper 2014/7 The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) data is rich in cognitive measures taken during childhood and adolescence, and also includes adult measures of literacy and numeracy. For the first time, the 2012 survey included a repeat measure in adulthood of a cognitive scale which had been used previously with the cohort in childhood – a vocabulary test first taken in 1986, when the cohort members were 16 years old. We find that both educational and occupational attainment, and reading habits in childhood and adulthood, are linked to vocabulary growth.

CLS Working Paper 2014/9 Over the last century the position of women in society has changed dramatically. Not only are more women entering and remaining in paid employment when they have children. Using British longitudinal data collected during the first twelve years of the 21st century, we explore how the sharing of domestic duties and childcare responsibilities has changed among the same families between 2000 – 2012.

CLS Working Paper 2014/8 This study expands our knowledge of consent in linking survey and administrative data by studying respondents’ behaviour when consenting to link their own records and when consenting to link those of their children. The study uses data from the longitudinal Millennium Cohort Study to analyse the correlates of consent in multiple domains (i.e. linkage of education, health and economic records). The findings show that respondent’s behaviour vary depending on the consent domain (i.e. education, health, and economic records) and on the person for whom consent is sought (i.e. main respondent vs. cohort member).

CLS Working Paper 2014/6 This paper is a serendipitous interdisciplinary review of literature prepared as background to work on NCDS and BCS70 on social mobility. The first part reviews literature on the definition, sources and labour market rewards to non-cognitive (‘soft’) skills or personality traits. It is generally agreed that these factors play a role over and above cognitive skills, but through complex pathways. The second part of the paper reviews the ways in which the notion of non-cognitive skill has been operationalized by researchers using the British cohort studies, particularly NCDS and BCS70, as part of the study of the inter-generational transmission of social advantage.

CLS Working Paper 2014/1 The aim of this working paper is to set out an approach to classifying the childhood social class of members of the 1958 British birth cohort study. The specific focus is on the use of mother’s occupation and household tenure, in addition to father’s occupation, in order to create a more meaningful and robust three-category measure of social class that is likely to be of particular utility for those using the newly available qualitative materials now associated with the study. The paper also provides a descriptive insight into the living conditions, during the 1960s, of children from different social classes.

CLS Working Paper 2013/12 There is still much we have to learn about the best ways of obtaining accurate and comprehensive information from children without undue burden. This paper describes the findings from two experiments undertaken to develop response categories to maximise data quality for a series of questions intended to be useable with 11 year olds. We find that how response options to questions are presented matters for children’s responses.

CLS Working Paper 2013/11 This paper highlights the socio-economic disadvantage experienced by disabled young children in England. The authors use the Millennium Cohort Study to first enhance understanding of what constitutes disability, showing the prevalence of disability among children using three different definitions: developmental delay (DD), long-standing limiting health conditions or illnesses (LSLI) and special education needs (SEN). The authors found that socio-economic disadvantage was strongly associated with certain SEN conditions, such as behaviour, learning or speech and language difficulties, but was not associated with dyslexia.

CLS Working Paper 2013/10 This paper examines socio-economic inequalities in cognitive test scores at age 16 for a nationally representative cohort of people born in Britain in 1970 (the 1970 British Cohort Study). The authors explore whether inequalities due to social background are similar across the three domains of vocabulary, spelling and mathematics, or whether they differ and to what extent these inequalities are accounted for by family material and cultural resources, as well as by children’s own reading. We show that childhood reading is linked to substantial cognitive progress between the ages of 10 to 16.

CLS Working Paper 2013/9 An innovative approach to reducing these costs, pioneered by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) on the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLS79) in the US, is to encourage, using an additional incentive, sample members to initiate contact and book an appointment for their interview, rather than waiting for an interviewer to contact them. This paper describes a randomised experiment, conducted on the Innovation Panel of Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) in 2011, which sought to evaluate whether this ‘early bird’ approach could be successful in a UK context.